Sundry Notes, June

Immigration, The American Experience™, Imperfection makes us human, and sundry recommendations

I. On immigration

Like many of you, my attention has been caught up in the protests and riots in Los Angeles against Trump’s order to increase immigration enforcement there.

As you know, I’m an immigrant to Europe. And as you might also know, I was an “illegal” immigrant for a little while. Specifically, I’d overstayed my Schengen visa, the one that allows US citizens to visit European countries for a total of three months during any six-month period.

Despite the illegal nature of my presence in France during that time, I was able to secure a lease, get renter’s insurance, and go to the doctor when I needed to. Fortunately, I didn’t need to find work because of my writing and editing income at the time (thanks especially to all those really amazing people who’d been supporting me through Patreon). Also, because I wasn’t from a North African country, the likelihood of the French police ever stopping me to ask for my papers was close to nil. And when I finally was able to “regularize” my presence in France, the worst that happened was that I was required to pay a small regularization fee as a penalty (about 500 euros if I remember correctly).

That is to say, there were no direct repercussions for my “crime,” but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fucking terrifying. First of all, I couldn’t travel long distances, as the risk of random passport checks increases significantly on trains. Secondly, I was essentially stuck in Europe, since exit controls would have immediately flagged my expired Schengen visa and then triggered a re-entry ban for a period of at least a year (and sometimes ten years or even forever). Worst of all, I had gotten myself into a physically abusive relationship which I couldn’t easily get out of, and any interactions with the police over my French partner’s actions would have again flagged my illegal status.

So, obviously, I’ve got some personal experience with immigration that deeply affects how I see the events in America right now. And I’m also an autonomist Marxist and therefore deeply aware of how the control of human movement has always been a priority for capitalists and states.

And it’s actually because of both my personal history and my historical understanding that I’m deeply frustrated by the failure of the American “left” to offer anything more than disorganized protests and social media outrage in response to the immigration issue. A handful of rioters posing for Instagram-level influencer aesthetics hardly counts as politics, nor does cheering on corrupt Democratic Party elected officials as heroes count as “resistance.”

I’ve written about the complex issues of immigration previously and how a real response to mass migrations needs to take into account the way immigrants are used by capitalists to deflate wages and dismantle working-class protections and then later used as scapegoats to redirect working-class anger away from the capitalist class. Also, no matter how much we might try to integrate into a culture, we immigrants will always affect the societies into which we move in complicated and sometimes destructive ways.

Any leftist politics that doesn’t take these processes into account only weaponizes immigrants on behalf of the capitalists, which is exactly why the capitalists created the American “anti-communist left” in the first place.

If you want to understand more about this complexity, here are two essays I’ve wrote last year on the matter.

II. The American Experience™

On the matter of immigration, my friend

Alley Valkyrie

has written a fantastic little essay about American “soft power” masquerading as a cute essay about American food in France.

As someone who has very little love for my homeland, words cannot describe the number of awkward moments I’ve had over the years when confronted with French folks who are enamored of the US as a result of American cultural influence and wanted nothing more than to gush about the magical land of fast cars and palm trees with someone who was actually from there and therefore could theoretically validate all of their beliefs.

At first, I would try my best to break the spell, softly pushing back on their fantasy with the much harsher reality that had been my lived experience for thirtysomething years in the US. But over time, frankly, I just gave up, as trying to make that argument is akin to yelling at the ocean and I don’t yell for my health.

What’s interesting about soft power, however, is that there are multiple aspects to it, and while the cultural influence is a huge piece, so is the political infuence. And while the former is something that seems impossible to dent even in the face of the current state of the world, the latter is one in which I have observed a stark evolution over the past decade.

Alley and I moved to the same city in France together, and my favorite memories of that time were talking about and eating food together. We were constantly laughing about (sometimes to keep ourselves from crying) the foods we missed and the bizarre ways in which the French would try to replicate them in caricature.

She was the first of us to notice the connection between those caricatures of food and the caricatures of the rest of American life which animated the imaginations of everyone we’d met. Even people we’d otherwise would have thought wiser would act utterly shocked when we’d even mention that there were poor people in America, or that neither of us had anything approximating health insurance when we lived in the United States.

Hollywood and the rest of the capitalist industrial entertainment industry functions exactly as Americans might imagine Soviet propaganda agencies functioned. It creates a hegemonic mythic framework through which the world views American culture, American values, and especially American politics. And this is just as true for the way Americans see themselves, including those of us who have left.

III. Imperfection makes us human

Since about fifty hours of my life every week is currently devoted to publishing (down, fortunately, from about sixty hours a week in the first four months of this year), I think a lot about books and the future of book publishing.

There’s quite a lot written about the threat of “AI” (which isn’t actually intelligence) to publishing, but I’m honestly not worried. Yes, I’ve certainly received quite a few submissions by idiots trying to pass off something a computer generated for them as a “manuscript,” but it’s no different from receiving any other poorly-written submission. Assuming you’ve actually read books before, you figure out quite quickly that it’s complete shit.

In trying to figure out precisely what the inherent human capacity is that immediately flags a piece of “content” (text, video, audio) as computer-generated, I’ve come to suspect it has something to do with its absence of imperfections. This is something you can see quite quickly in computer-generated video.

Take for example any of the “100 Wild Examples” shown in this slobberingly-worshipful video montage:

In all cases, the faces of the “humans” are too symmetrical, too “perfect,” which then leaves them all feeling flat and alien. Computer-generated text exhibits the very same problem: even when the scammer has tried to enforce variations in sentence structure or rhythm, the effect feels too “perfect” or mathematical.

Imperfections are actually how we identify people. The “flaws” in a lover’s face are exactly like the “flaws” in their personality, quirks we pretend to overlook for their benefit but actually hold close to our hearts as their defining features. Having one nostril bigger than the other, a few eyebrow hairs longer than the others, the flecks of grey or the blemishes on skin: these are in fact the things that signal back to us our love for them.

In writing, it is the same. Good writing is flawed in a deeply human way, taking meandering paths to lead us to something it wants us to see and sometimes failing completely. Sometimes it uses far too many words, sometimes not nearly enough, and we love it not in spite of these failures but actually because of them.

IV. Sundry Recommendations

Speaking of deeply human writing, I’ve got a few recommendations for you.

First of all, I’d be utterly remiss if I didn’t try to convince you to order a copy of an extremely addictive book I helped work on for the last few years.

That book is Fimbulwinter: A Ski Saga, by Nathan Alexander Ross.

Nathan sent me the manuscript two years ago after emailing me shyly, wondering if maybe I’d be interested in a Norse fantasy involving American stoner ski bums and a technological conspiracy. And I’m really glad I didn’t say “no.”

The book is fast and fun and a hell of a lot deeper than you might expect. Especially, Nathan includes in his overall plot something I’ve always wanted to see in fiction; a merging of the tech-bro fantasy of the Singularlity with the monotheist demiurge.

The book comes out on 21 June and can be pre-ordered for 20% off (along with all our other titles) with code SOLSTICE.

And a second recommendation, this time for a Substack poet. It’s been a personal mission of mine to promote poetry as much as possible, because the death of poetry means the death of language. So, if you like short lyric poetry, definitely consider checking out

Dan O’Neill

.

And speaking of poetry and good writing and lyric, I just learned that one of my favorite writers in the whole fucking world also happens to have had and is restarting a career in hip-hop. And if you’ve read his work, maybe this surprises you as much as it did me.

From 2013 to 2023 he took a hiatus from hip-hop to focus on flamenco. During this period he performed his poetry and dance regularly in Granada’s Sala Vimaambi, as well as venues in Europe, Africa, and North America. He is the author of two pocket poetry books, as well as a lyrical collection of essays in Hebrew, Arabic, and Romance philology—centred around the crossroads between language and the land—entitled The Dead Hermes Epistolary.

The writer in question? Slippery Elm. And he’s got a new album coming out called Emerald Tablet.

And finally, a brief reminder that you can still get a yearly subscription for 20% off: